One World Natural Grocery

Abstract

This chapter examines the One World Natural Grocery and its unusual hybrid of representative and participatory democratic control, in which a network of autonomous work groups and elected committees share responsibility for managing day-to-day and long-term operations. Unlike either the older collectivist-democratic cooperatives or the managerial bakery, the grocery's hybrid democracy is not coupled with unequal economic rewards or political power. The chapter first explores the allocation of earnings within the grocery, and contextualizes them at its locale. Next, it describes the grocery's political organization, detailing the workings of a complex and decentralized form of organizational power where governance and management overlap in unusual ways. The chapter then addresses the grocery's successes and failures in distributing economic and political rewards and rights across differences of class, race/ethnicity, and gender. Finally, it summarizes the potential and limits of such a densely clustered democratic structure for an alternative market organization, and what lessons the grocery might offer to workers more generally.